Olympia Time

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Category: tvw (Page 3 of 3)

TVW and flash is right around the corner

September 29, 2007 / / 0 Comments

What I really love about TVW is the communication I get from them over the weekend. Scott, the IT director at TVW comments on a post down below about flash:

I would like to If I may, elaborate on the flash issue. We have reasons for not jumping into all flash on tvw.org right now; like I mentioned in the email, we will not move to flash for our video content until the release of flash ver 9. Currently flv video files for a 2 hour event are nearly 500mb each, and a flash server to comparably handle the traffic streams we serve is not free (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/productinfo/pricing/#ft2).
We cover over 300 events in video and almost 700 in audio a year and soon that number may triple, so you can very quickly see how a 500mb file can be a problem.

TVW’s library of content exceeds 60,000 hours and as you know it keeps growing. We do not intend to remove media from the site so we have to be smart about making the right choices and balancing between what make sense to both our infrastructure/limited resources and the delivery mechanisms that allows the content to get out there on the web.
That said, Windows media server is free, and the file size for the same video is 150mb and the quality is much better.

There is light at the end of the tunnel since flash will soon support mpeg4. This format is lower in file size and much better quality than flashes flv format and arguably the windows format as well. We have a really great interface we are working on for the flash player when we implement it. Let me know if any of you want to test drive it before we launch (feedback is always welcome)

I really do appreciate your dialog; it helps us keep in touch with users of the site and helps us also be the best in the country for what we do. We should all be proud of what we have in WA State. Because there’s not many states with “TVW’s” that offer the amount of content and breadth of coverage TVW offers Washingtonians. My hope is that more us get involved and use tvw’s resources!

Thanks Scott!

TVW is so cool, getting cooler

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I can’t find anyone that’s noted it, but TVW.org has undergone a radical redesign recently. I’ve had my issues with TVW in the past (here, here, here and here), but I have to say that I’m impressed with where they’re going.

Most of my past problems with TVW is that they didn’t make it easy to share what they were putting up on the internet. Its still not that easy, but I can see them going in that direction.

I had problems with the new website, so I emailed the help line on a Saturday. And, on that same Saturday their Director of Information Technology emailed me back. On a Saturday. That’s cool.

Emmet that new windows media 11 plug-in is tricky with Firefox. There are a few fixes for Firefox that should be applied and the browser should be re-started after the installation of the plug-in. one thing to also note: you have to have the regular version of windows media player 11 installed on your windows machine. Version 10 will cause the version 11 plug-in to fail. this should fix your issues.

We do use flash in a minimal fashion but because of the lengthy nature of our events, we are waiting until the mpeg4 codec is supported in flash player 9 (coming in fall) until we start a migration of our streaming servers to flash via mpeg4. So in short, soon. I hope this helps and there are many help items online about this issue.

Its also worth noting that TVW’s executive director Cindy Zehnder is going to be the governor’s chief of staff next week. In my whining about TVW, Ms. Zehnder was very responsive to my concerns and I was invited to a meeting up in Seattle that sought to brainstorm about the future direction of TVW. I wasn’t able to go, but being invited was very cool.

Small victory of the day, flash embed of TVW content

March 1, 2007 / / 0 Comments

This is the first example I’ve seen of a mainstream outlet (media in the regular business of being media) using TVW content in a shareable format. Anyone can go up to the page and pick up the sound clip and put it on their own page, blog, website or what-have-you.

The SR blogger could make it easier by providing source code to do it, but anyone with any know how can just figure it out. See, I did it here:

If you want to find out how, give this a read.

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